Musings of a Genealogy-Nut

Second Cousin Once Removed:

My second-cousin-once-removed, Jennifer and me.

 Through matching tree entries in Ancestry.com, Jennifer and I discovered "missing" branches of our families.  Her great-grandmother and my grandfather were siblings.  The children of the two families were so close they even had their photos taken together.

My Uncle Sid at the top, Uncle Lyman on the right.  Their Cousins Hilmar and Naomi are at the left. About 1904 before my aunt and mother were born and younger cousin Doris..

My mother remembered the 7 children being together often...then when Mother was about 7 or 8 they didn't seem to spend any more time together.  Why?  I had not been able to locate information on the internet and that branch of the family tree was just gone.


The story was this:  My grandfather's sister, (Jen's great-grandmother), died in her early 40s leaving her minister husband with 3 young children.  Eventually he remarried but the link between the two families was gone and never was restored...until now!!!


Jen had a photo of the old family home where her great-grandmother and my grandfather were raised.  How precious THAT was! 

I passed on the originals of about 8 photos of her ancestors that belong rightfully to her and her sister.  We exchanged information about our respective branches and our current families.


A lovely afternoon!!!

Since our break-throughs often change the nature of a whole part of our genealogy, they also often make some heritage scrapbook pages in error, or irrelevant.  Rather than destroy those pages, I have made some of them a first part to a two-part double page.

The Meyer Family

JOURNALING - Original Heritage Page: In spite of many hours searching Ancestry web sites, we can find no trace of my grandfather’s sister, Tracy, husband Monty, or children, Hilmar, Doris, and Naomi (not pictured).  At the time of these photos they lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan and exchanged many formal photos with my mother’s family.  They were dear and close cousins.  Where are they?

The Meyer Family-revisited

JOURNALING: Follow-up page created over a year later:  One day, while searching on Ancestry.Com, I noticed a “shaking leaf” by mother’s Cousin Monty’s name.  When I found the matching information, on someone else’s tree I sent her a message.  Monty was her great-grandfather.  She was able to fill in family information.  Monty’s mother, Tracy, my grandfather’s sister, died young and Monty remarried.. That seemed to separate the two families.  I will be meeting this relative in a few weeks and giving her the collection of photos of Monty's family I have saved.

Several sites where you enter your family tree information will alert you when there are matches between your tree and another one on file.  If the site allows messages between tree owners you MIGHT find a long lost cousin, pieces of important information,or location information.

In another case, I am still searching for some information.  I created a pair of pages and will be submitting them here and there hoping to find someone who recognizes the place or people.

This farm tintype from Grandma Anderson's collection

 JOURNALING: This tintype was with my grandmother’s things when she died.  It is very large for a tintype and must have been important.  It could be either a Scarlett farm or an Anderson farm.  Scarlett farms were in Indiana, most in Noble County.  The one Anderson farm was in Ohio.  The number of people could include in-laws and hired hands.  There are 8 children, the husband and wife in the center, an older man and woman (in-laws?), and two older girls who could be servants or relatives.  Since there are no possible cousins, second, or third, this beautiful homestead remains a mysterious link to my ancestry.  We roughly dated it to  the 1890s.

The main people in the photo

JOURNALING:
These appear to be the parents in the photo of the Family Farm.  They do not match any other people in photos or tintypes that I have.  There are some children, one young lady and, what appears to be, 2 housemaids and an older man:  hired hands or some in-laws.  I will keep looking to see if any of them match a known ancestor.

More than anything, I would like to know if this beautiful farmhouse still exists and how it fits into my genealogy.

I finally did it...I bought the new Family Tree Maker, 2011.  I can't even think how old the one is that I have been using.  Well, it serves me right...what a learning curve!  Had I kept upgrading each year the changes, no doubt, would have been spread out and so much easier to handle.  Oh, I will get it and I will figure out how to do the things I need to do.  The changes are positive, I need to adjust.

While rummaging through things for my Lifebook for my paternal grandmother, I idly leafed through my father's baby book.  I knew about it and knew my grandmother had kept good records of my dad's early life, but did any of it pertain to HER early adulthood.  There in the back was something I had never noticed before...the newspaper article about her wedding.

It looks as if she glued the article into the book with mucilage and then covered it with cellophane tape.  The tape fell off as soon as I opened the book, taking some of the article with it.  I have reconstructed the text the best I can.  Every time I study it I work out another word or so.

We talk about "Brick Walls" all the time when we have a need for a piece of information that just doesn't seem to exist.  My Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather presents one of those Brick Walls for a whole slew of genealogists out there who are among his descendants.  He and his children seem to have been very prolific, with families of 12 to 17 children common.  I seem to run into these descendants on almost every big genealogy site and all have the same question..."Where did Newman Scarlett come from?"  Some of these genealogist-descendants are quite professional and advanced.

Well, I still don't have that answer but I WAS able to add to his story.  Years ago I set up several "Google Alerts".  I receive an email whenever a particular term shows up in a news story or website.  My two home towns, in Michigan and in Florida, and my "brick wall" ancestor's name.  What alerts I get usually are entertainment news with the names of actor Paul Newman next to fellow actor, Scarlett Johansson.  A couple of weeks ago, however, my ancestor's name was in an article from his town of Tewksbury, Massachusetts.  The newly formed historical society was setting about to photograph historic sites in their midst.  The first to be photographed was my ancestor's farm.  I immediately contacted a distant cousin who seems to be the most involved with the genealogy of our family.  Even she was not aware of the existence of the farm.  Several of us have now joined the new Historic Society and hope to visit and preserve the farmhouse, presently being considered for demolition.  My brother and I hope to visit Tewksbury this spring and look for a few other gems and take our own photos.  Of particular interest will be the possible existence of the old city hall and his clerk's office where he died behind his desk.  I also would like to locate the old map of the town he helped draw and design, and any old papers in his handwriting.